Anne Rice's latest Vampire Chronicles installment is a bloody good time

In one of the most famous cases of man-on-the-street criticism, a London cabby once told Sir Arthur Conan Doyle that, while Sherlock Holmes might not have died when he went over the Reichenbach Falls, "he was never the same man after."Well, the Vampire Lestat has by definition not died, but he isn't the same intellectually seductive specter either. To use the rock metaphor he chose...

Blood-curdling Halloween horror

What could be more appropriate on Halloween than reading books guaranteed to make you check under the bed and inside the closet before you go to sleep at night? If you're tired of reading the same old horror classics, don't worry; this fall there is a cornucopia of new novels guaranteed to give you the creeps. Start your scary sojourn by sampling the work of Tananarive Due, the...

Spooky stories for the season

Like the vampire, lovers of horror tales have appetites that can't always be sated with a single offering. Anthologies are a natural home for the terror tale, from creature-feature film festivals to the bloody pulp stories of the fabled EC Comics to chilling short story collections by the likes of Poe, Lovecraft, and others. In that spirit, prepare for a trio of terrible tomes that dish up...